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KickStarter Mechajammer (formerly Copper Dreams) - cyberpunk RPG from Whalenought Studios

Diggfinger

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Belgium
I hope both are in the game.

*From Kickstarter page*

Question from Jabberwock, 2nd August 2018
"Wow, this is crazy. I had to double check the game title, things look so different. You guys are doing a lot of amazing stuff. I've liked every evolution of the art style before, though I have to say that I miss the look as it was in update 18, with the night streets and moody lighting. The world colors are so bright now that I'm having trouble picturing that. Maybe these are just daytime shots and that's throwing me off? I feel like I need to see more of it."

Reply Joe:
Jabberwok — the scenes shown off here are during a mid-day round, so the color grading is as bright as things get. We'll show off the day/night cycle next update, colors, fog and linework art changes throughout the day in realtime every set amount of rounds. Aesthetically more noir at night while retaining the visuals needed for the illustrated look, and interiors black-out tiles outside a characters line-of-sight, so that gets much more claustrophobic.
 
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Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I like the new screenshot but it doesn't exactly make me want to jump up and dance. It's weird to see a dismal boiler room praised as "stunning". I hope this represents some diversity of palettes and not a reversion to "Dark brown on dark grey. That's the game!"
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
Developer
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Nosgoth
Oh, the hatching-based shading could be tricky to make work. The dev of "Return of the Obra Dinn" has redone his system several times, because it looked crappy when things (both the camera and animated objects) moved and was a bit difficult to play for any length of time.

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1363742#msg1363742

edit: Though it looks like the shading is done in texture rather than in screen space, so it'll work just like objects and would probably move fine. (like the comics effect in the Walking Dead games?)

I checked out the link — whatever they are doing looks similar with edge and luminance checks, but instead are rendering everything on the screen with it, and in first person, which looks quite a bit trickier. Hannah would know better, but for this we have 3 different types — the shadow edges using Unity’s shadow map we access and edit in the deferred pipeline, the sort of edge/detect AO around objects to plant hatches onto surfaces, which is similar to the line-of-sight tiles which also use that. Those all are in world-space, not screen space, so the only dithering we get is if they are too thin like any other object, but we may make them a bit thicker or make hatches going both ways to mitigate that.

We committed not to do any linework in the textures themselves, I find that terribly schlocky, and visually creates all sorts of different line fidelity. We're treating like a 2d canvas, with same thicknesses, blocked out textures, a specific palette of colors, and chunky modeling to integrate the way we want with the linework stuff going on after.

I hope both are in the game.

Colors and contrast are tricky with all the LOS and tile visuals going onto of it that show the mechanics — colors need to work well with interiors, exteriors, day and night. We didn’t have it on for that screenshot, but interior tiles that aren't in a line-of-sight are black, and outside tiles not in it are half-black, so something else we have to work with. Like Diggfinger mentioned, we do some color adjustments on time of day and map locations too, but there's a consistent, limited palette tinting everything.

QXIavc6.jpg


https://twitter.com/whalenought/status/1031069191137198081

Looking very delicious.


Whalenought_Joe @Whalenough_Hannah


Are you designing for a specific monitor resolution? Will we play fullscreen or windowed?

I'm thinking about how playing Ultima VII on modern hardware displaying more of the games map basically broke the game.

Yeah I find mods for that kind of stuff pretty stupid, and breaking in games without a camera that pans. In ours everything outside player vision radius is black anyway. Everyone will be playing with the same fullscreen HUD and aspect ratio, showing a bit more bottom/top or side HUD if they have different aspects. We’re generally testing that on a 1920x1080 and 5120x2880, optimizing for 2560x1440. We could do different HUD aspect ratio sizes later, but not a priority.
 

buffalo bill

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It's sort of hard to tell from the picture, but has the game switched from hexes to a grid? And it looks like the PC takes up five squares rather than seven as in the last update. I don't really care either way, as long as it works well mechanically and visually, but the hexes were nice imo.
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
Developer
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Messages
215
Location
Nosgoth
It's sort of hard to tell from the picture, but has the game switched from hexes to a grid?

We liked the idea of hexes too, but smaller environments were tricky to navigate intuitively, and having tiles micro-sized gets the benefits of nuanced directions regardless of what shape they are. I think Diablo used a similarly small tileset to good effect. The line-of-sight and lighting is much more predictable as squares than hexes, and since we already had squarish layouts we just switched to that for ease of use. Movement tiles and Line of sight tiles are separate, so we'll see what early players think in the alpha map.

And it looks like the PC takes up five squares rather than seven as in the last update. I don't really care either way, as long as it works well mechanically and visually, but the hexes were nice imo.

Same as we were doing for hexes, there is a front tile, two flanks and back tile that make up the normal sized characters, which we’ll be using for ailment hit locations, back stabs and other modifiers.
 

Merlkir

Arcane
Developer
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Oct 12, 2008
Messages
1,216
We committed not to do any linework in the textures themselves, I find that terribly schlocky, and visually creates all sorts of different line fidelity. We're treating like a 2d canvas, with same thicknesses, blocked out textures, a specific palette of colors, and chunky modeling to integrate the way we want with the linework stuff going on after..

That’s a good call, it goes against the desired effect of an animated drawing when the linework sticks to surface of objects and you see it move and rotate in 3D. (And as you say, when perspective distorts line thickness)
Can’t wait to see more of it in motion!
 

Grotesque

±¼ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Vatnik
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Divinity: Original Sin Divinity: Original Sin 2
I like the new screenshot but it doesn't exactly make me want to jump up and dance. It's weird to see a dismal boiler room praised as "stunning"

You're on the Codex for 14 years and it still strikes you as weird the amount of cocksucking that is going around here?

*tones down the brightness of the colors*

Europeans: Yes, this is better.

There is a legend that Disneyland Paris became profitable after frenchmen changed the color scheme for a more toned down version. :)
 

Avonaeon

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Developer
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Sep 20, 2010
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593
Location
Denmark
New screenshot, once again, looks a lot better. I guess my biggest gripe initially was just that it was such an early picture of the transition and as such looked unappealing. But I'm very glad to see the newer screens still have that gritty feel; I just hope we get a better look at it in motion in a new video at some point.
 

agris

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6,761
The UI looks good to me, it’s distinctive and evocative of the general world aesthetic. It’s what a well executed UI for this type of game should be.
 
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lophiaspis

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
Agreed, the left and right sidebars look really good. Some of the visually best UI I've seen. The icons on the bottom are also decent but could use a makeover to bring them up to same quality. Also the wiring on the lower right looks a little off.
 

geno

Savant
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Aug 21, 2018
Messages
718
Location
Spain
This will be delayed to 2019, isn't it?

Arrrrghhhh, bright orange in GUI...rip my eyes.
Seems like a placeholder to me. I doubt the orange thing is on purpose

The UI looks good to me, it’s distinctive and evocative of the general world aesthetic. It’s what a well executed UI for this type of game should be.

It's fucking garbage.
They are changing the UI like in each KS update. They're itinerating so of course it lacks polish. See it like a sketch.
 

toro

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Apr 14, 2009
Messages
14,030
The UI looks good to me, it’s distinctive and evocative of the general world aesthetic. It’s what a well executed UI for this type of game should be.

It's fucking garbage.
They are changing the UI like in each KS update. They're itinerating so of course it lacks polish. See it like a sketch.

The new visual style is absolute garbage from any point of view. There is something called ligne claire but this mush is far from it. This is just shit sprayed in a frame. Only fanbois, color blind or visually impaired people can claim otherwise. The same thing applies to the new UI.

And the most baffling thing is that the old visuals were bad as well however the KS backers validated them when they pledged for the game. It's fair to say that most backers expect something similar to the KS project proposal but the new iterations are so bad that most of them are complaining in the KS update's comments.

Anyway the estimated release date for this was March 2017 and now it's August 2018 and they are doing iterations for the UI, visuals and combat. At this point in time they should be doing post-release maintenance instead of prototyping the game. Because sketching means exactly that: prototyping ... and that should have happened before or at the start of the KS campaign.

I have a feeling this project is turning into a unmitigated disaster but I guess it's alright as long as they can iterate further ... and we can pretend that it's still 2016.
 
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Mustawd

Guest
The UI looks good to me, it’s distinctive and evocative of the general world aesthetic. It’s what a well executed UI for this type of game should be.

The UI looks good to me, it’s distinctive and evocative of the general world aesthetic. It’s what a well executed UI for this type of game should be.

It's fucking garbage.

I actually think it looks quite stylish and fits the theme and feel of the new art quite well.

I’d have to see it in action before commenting on its utility.

The new visual style is absolute garbage from any point of view. There is something called ligne claire but this mush is far from it. This is just shit sprayed in a frame. Only fanbois, color blind or visually impaired people can claim otherwise

I’ll have to disagree. I actually love their use of color now. Drab colored games exist, and that’s fine. But the KS art direction was lacking in that it didn’t really have any cohesiveness beyond “we love gray. A lot. We love it”

But at this point, like a lot of ppl have mentioned, it’s down to preference. Reminds me of Battle Brothers in how ppl were turned off by the floating Busts even though the art on them was very well done.
 
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grimace

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Jan 17, 2015
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1,959
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/copper-dreams/posts/2271491

Update #21

Aug 24 2018

The Gun of the Face — Words! Rolling for Social Interactions


Greetings!

Wanted to let you all catch up on news since the last update in one place!

Office Contagions Squelched
Unfortunately we have a short delay on that alpha, something to do with living and working in a studio apartment all day every day means if someone picks something up, things can travel quick. Amplified with Seattle’s overwhelming amount of smoke this last week thanks to California being an inferno, what should have been a small sickness knocked us out pretty hard. Our usual temperate weather turned something more Mordor-like, but we’re catching up now and it should only be a week or so out. We’ll be able to get that with a proper trailer in the next week too.

130e87c6ee1aff20733736810176fda6_original.png

The Great Eye somewhere beyond the smoke
Community Page
We’ve had some updates on our design goals for the game on our community page, and are going to continue to through the alpha and beta. We’re happy we can show these in action now, you can hopefully get a sense of what we’re trying to achieve through the remainder of development, which you can help shape when we get testing!

Stay Tuned this weekend for a video we have and should be done editing with some more playthrough and mechanics shaping up very nicely for you. We'll also have our first poll which we'll be doing regularly where you guys can choose which of the sub-milestones we have for the alpha -> beta timeline you'd like to see in the game to test first.

Grass Tiles
0af786328d53484af32346e4c6f75a9e_original.gif

Some greenery contain bug ailments that latch onto you for a few rounds or until you shake them off. Nature is wonderful!
Grass tiles have been implemented for an obstacle modifier, so you can authentically role-play the Predator. Grass-like tiles (usually mushrooms, algae, or other weird, alien substances) usually only shows up underground or around the water Blocks, though you'll also get the bonus for creeping in an office shrubbery.

Previous Posts: Low Battery

Had a short post on your cybernetics yelling at you when they are low on battery for some technology atmosphere + gameplay.

Low battery post

Universal Text Bar
You can do lots of different types of actions for movements, weapons, or other skills, and having them icon based was getting a little abstract, to say the least. We've instead created a multi-field text bar with contextual buttons based on the action being used. Moving gives you rotational and different movement types, while a weapon skill will provide you with options for all the different uses of it.

When the DM chimes in another bar pops in on top, it's where you can type things to chat, and contains any other information that's helpful with actions, like your tile to tick number when moving or any modifiers to attacks and the number you're trying to roll under. It's been a lot easier, and keeps a smooth skill operation to quickly change and use actions.

5e8b3a6aca894e89e54e94c44cec47c1_original.png

Bar displaying Move action options. Right Clicking toggles move or last chosen action
Along with showing ground items as text in your immediate area you can click on to pick up or put down, as well as characters or objects, we've gotten rid of a lot of the pixel-hunting that existed and makes gameplay very simple.

Micro-Tiles with less corners
Since moving to micro-tiles, the larger hex shapes required for the volumetric LOS and therefore the environment, began to be obsolete. While larger squares are stupid for navigating, having micro squares makes it so it doesn't really matter. Importantly, it makes navigating obstacles a little more obvious, as the hexes made for some confusion in tighter environments (determining what was 'behind' a small pillar or box that was hexagon shaped is less obvious at a glance than squares). Fortunately all the maps were already fairly squared off, we just arranged some of the tile-sets to remove the unnecessary angles, and things are looking good.

Characters can be made up of a variety of sizes, children, bugs, rats or tiny robots being one, and the usual being the 5 size. For 5 sized characters we have basic orientations for determining directional attacks (like shots to people from behind add to hit chance). Front, two flanks, and back. We haven't coordinated these with medical yet, but it's a possibility to determine which arm gets hit depending on the orientation of a character. The way we have it in the ruleset right now is pretty nice feeling, with misses falling on nearby limbs in order of proximity before missing completely, but it's an interesting concept we could look into later. We'd be curious to see what you think when you start playing.

The actual pathfinding grid is now made up of 9 tiles for every LOS / environment tile, which fits nice and easily. We're using a d&d method that was used at some point for diagonal tile movement, or the dementia is kicking in early and we're misremembering. Every two diagonal tiles is an extra tick for movement. Things flow smoothly and predictably, so we're happy with it.

Patience Meter
For a Social skill, we wanted to make social actions have actual agency, where a player would have tangible results and rolls they can foresee and be used as effectively as any other skill like pistols or chemistry. The result was very simple, but only made possible by having robust systemic behaviors of NPCs, patrols, and AI for enemies where they can react to successful or fail rolls with fun results.

Most guards you come across aren’t going to shoot-to-kill unprovoked. Cybermutants or kill-patrol robots sure, but your average rent-a-cop isn't going to start with warning shots right at your face. They yell at you and what we call the patience meter pops up above them, like any other ticks for an action. If the timer runs out, or you piss them off early, then they’ll start attacking you.

Mechanics for this are designed with two types of NPC Patience Meters, an Unwanted Patience meter accounting for locations you aren’t wanted, and a Hostile Patience Meter for places you most certainly aren’t supposed to be. These meters for now are 20 and 10 ticks, respectively, enough time to talk to the NPC or move away from the situation.

Unwanted

You’re told to scram, with three outcomes:

  • Leave line of sight and meter ends
  • Don’t leave and turn into a hostile patience meter
  • Aggravate NPC and start combat
Hostile

Three outcomes:

  • Thwart NPC in some way
  • Player gets stunned thrown in a dumpster outside or in Jail, depending on the NPC group they are in.
  • Don’t do as told, or aggravate NPC in some other way, and start combat
Other mechanics for Hostile: * If you’re armed, you are asked to drop your weapon on the ground. * If not armed, skip to a warning text and the NPC immediately starting toward you to begin a stunning action. * Moving away from their line of sight alerts them and makes them hostile, marking your last known position as usual. * Dropping your weapon will make them walk toward you to start stunning action at close-range, which you can also use to your advantage

So how do you end some of these scenarios? If you’re a combat character, starting to aim at an NPC will just start their combat routine, so that’s easy, but if you want some more subtly or keep things quiet you have a lot of other (quieter) options. If your character has Unarmed skills you can take advantage of that stunning action and use a Grapple action to suplex them into the ground and knock them out. For the sake of this update, you can also walk up to them and roll Social to talk them down. If you do need to get rid of the NPC, besides, It’s easier when they aren’t shooting back anyway.

Skill: Social
We wrote a more in-depth post on the community site detailing what we want to do with the skill, and now we wanted to show that in-action. If you missed it the post is below and also goes into detail where disposition comes from within the character sheet.

In Copper Dreams characters are pretty squishy, and you have some player-advantage things in play like not being limited to vision cones and being invisible in shadow if standing still. Though NPCs also get the latter if they are sneaking themselves, so get that spot-check ready. Because you find yourself in situations where NPCs usually don’t want you around or want to eat or kill you, gameplay focuses on you creeping around like a horror movie monster where you are picking off enemies one-by-one. And that is how a lot of builds are suited to play, but we wanted to add to that with something more subtle, for espionage and stealth, and also because killing people can be loud and there can be other quiet ways of clearing a building. To this end we used the gun of the face — your words.

Social builds in games typically have the least agency, you are bound to whatever few choices the designer lets you choose from at that moment. Agency requires a degree of foresight into application of your skills, but for dialogue thats usually just at the whim of whatever conversational or story context the designer has in mind. Players often want to tell an NPC something that the designer didn't add to their dialogue, so why not actually let them say tags to anyone they want, whenever they want?

Social actions are commands you can attempt to tell NPCs, with failure and success rates like any roll where you'll roll 3d8 under your skill number (+challenge mods). A whole slew of things make up that challenge number, which in this case is the degree of difficulty of what you're asking them and your disposition to one another.

f2988e8f79b3b5183ba2176497363060_original.gif

Changing from a regular Social Action to a bribe, still no success.
For example you could tell a guard to go home for the night if they encounter you, and if successful they have some contextual things they can mutter, "sure, good, idea, I think I left the oven on". This is to be interpreted as if the Terminator or Snake Plissken is tellingsomeone, not asking. The NPC knows you're trouble, so it's you rolling to just convince them they don't want to make things worse by not listening.

11438e33147097a423560252ad2119ec_original.gif

A successful roll!
If you have a low roll odds, you have some options for additive modifiers. Bribe, which gives them cigarettes if you have them, is an easy one at the expense of bartering goods. Threaten is more potent, allowing you to choose a weapon, but makes them hostile if you fail, so higher risk. Weapons have a lethal number, so choosing the meanest thing you got is the way to go for this, but is also based on how well your skill is with whatever the weapon is designed for, so you don't fumble.

c3ac50de0bf125c3deb592f11216598b_original.gif

Failing to threaten with a 2 handed laser repeater rifle being met in kind.
Dialogue in Copper Dreams is somewhat detached from the Social skill — it remains tag-based, you can inquire about certain text strings to get more information, branch into things depending on backgrounds or character-sheet stats, or show an NPC something from your inventory.

2a372bdc0daabaf1ac1b991f7f6bee30_original.gif

NPCs talk to you or each other, and you can inquire, is how that mainly works. It's for branching story and narrative quests, which the player chooses for their character through actions in-game and at the start of the game during character creation — more on that in the disposition post linked below.

Orchid is optimized for pistols and social, so you can have a good go at the alpha with just sneaking and rolling to convince your way through. She’s also equipped with an eyepatch cybernetic that induces a pretty solid social boost on humans specifically with some hypnotizing-like lights that pop on and off to daze someone.

Disposition Recap Post
Previous Post is here, talking more in-depth about how we grab and use Character Disposition:


Social Skill Disposition Post
 

buffalo bill

Arcane
Joined
Dec 8, 2016
Messages
1,004
The newly re-muted color palette makes the characters a bit hard to distinguish from the background in this zoomed out image. Other than that, there's nothing really wrong with the colors, but I've gotta say I preferred the more bombastic colors from the previous iteration of gfx (and I liked hexes, but a sacrifice of hexes for squares is understandable for mechanical reasons).

Everything the devs say, though, makes this game sound too-good-to-be-true for a Neuromancer-loving, 70s/80s movie-watching and comics-reading, 80s/90s RPG-playing person such as myself.
 
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grimace

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
Update #21

". . . we've gotten rid of a lot of the pixel-hunting that existed and makes gameplay very simple."

This is a welcome improvement over Serpent.

Thank you.
 

Jarpie

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 30, 2009
Messages
6,603
Codex 2012 MCA
I preferred the previous palette, I liked it more colorful. We have enough dull-looking drab brown-grey games.
 

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